I wouldn’t call the “average position” metric pointless, but it’s definitely lying to you. Most people approach this metric with a natural misunderstanding. It’s natural to think “this is the average position that my organic listing or paid ad shows up at in a search for this keyword.” Sorry, but no. How could a tool just flat out lie to you? Well, the tool isn’t lying to you. It’s your understanding of what that metric is communicating that is lying to you. In a recent article titled “The big lie of AdWords average position,” light is shed upon this subject. But, this goes beyond AdWords to organic search and many other applications in life as well.

For many businesses, a major benefit of outsourcing their web marketing strategy to a company like ours is the fact that they get the knowledge and skill of a whole web marketing team for what most of the time amounts to the cost of one (maybe two) employees. Depending on the nature of the business, that can be hard to beat. But, along with it comes a challenge – communication. We fought with this hard for a while sitting in meetings and brainstorming realistic ways in which to communicate better with clients while balancing the hours we spend doing this with formulating and implementing strategies to get results.

In the early days of the web, all interaction with a business online happened in one place – on their website. Businesses would create content, put it on their site, and followers would come to the site and consume the new content. Measuring success was rather easy at this point. You simply tagged your site and one analytics tool would collect all of your data for analysis. Of course, we know this has all changed.

As every good website owner knows, collecting data and seeing what happens leaves out an all-important piece of the puzzle. To truly take action on the data you’ve now collected, you need to know why it is the way it is…If you really want to know how to make your site experience better, you can’t just look at your data. You’ve got to get the voice of your customer.

With the meteoric rise of social media marketing, it only makes sense that tools to monitor those marketing efforts would proliferate. Paid tools run the gamut, from blessedly affordable (for solopreneurs […]

Two posts ago, I talked about the importance of laying a web analytics foundation for your company by measuring, valuing and analyzing the critical few visitor behaviors on your site that have an impact on your bottom line. In my last post, I talked about the step after that. That is to acquire the reasons the data you’ve collected is the way it is (the why?). Once you’ve listened to why your customers couldn’t complete whatever tasks they were trying to accomplish on your site, you should have a bunch of ideas on how to fix it.

It doesn’t need to be said that the higher-ups mostly care about getting more of what they want to happen to actually happen. If you can show that it is happening and that giving you more money will make it happen more, then you’ll most likely get more money to make it happen more. Getting the budget you need can seem like rocket science, but it’s really not. If may not be easy, but it is simple.

People that own companies or those in companies that make decisions on how to use a web marketing budget are shown, whether it’s their fault or not, too much website data that doesn’t directly relate to an impact on the bottom line. What’s wrong with this? Only looking at visits and pageviews gives an incomplete story of how a site is truly performing for its customers and the company. So when it’s time to decide how to invest, there’s nothing concrete that gives confidence in where to put money. To combat this problem, there needs to be a fundamental mindset shift to focusing on outcomes.

We’ve talked about what makes a good metric to look at for your business. But, you have to be careful here. There is soooo much data wrapped up in what seems at times like an endless amount of possible metrics that if you are not careful, you will catch yourself wasting your time lost at sea with no idea as to how to get back home where you belong. By “home,” I mean those critical metrics that will measure what needs to change at this specific point in time for your online efforts to improve.

…the bottom line for magnificent success is the people…invest multiple times more in her or him, or more of them, if you truly want to take action on your data. Otherwise, you are simply data rich and information poor…a great tool in the hands of your reporting squirrel is useless. A free/inexpensive/underpowered tool in the hands of your analysis ninja will yield massive results that impact your bottom line…

…you need to drastically rethink what it means to use data on the web…there is a lot of data, but there are fundamental barriers to making intelligent decisions…because clickstream data is great at the what, but not at the why…it’s important to know what happened, but it is even more critical to know why people do the things they do on your site…and the what else, which is perhaps the most underappreciated data on the web…your web analytics tool can report only what it can record…if you marry the what with the why and the what else, you’ll have a lifetime of happiness…

In a typical business, the highest paid person’s opinion usually wins. This does not mean that their opinion is always the most informed though. It’s just the most powerful. The problem is that it is also the least accountable. But, in the world of the web, there’s a new sheriff in town. Data. This is because data (when used correctly) can provide accountability for decisions made.

So far, we’ve looked at pattern analysis and failure analysis as ways in which you can use your internal site search data to improve your website (which you should be doing!). But, there’s more than just search queries to look at. There are also search sessions that you may be able to look into for more insights. A search session occurs when a searcher executes multiple queries in one session while trying to address a single information need. As they interact with your search results and content, it should tell you a lot about how your site is servicing them.